Har Gobind Khorana

Har Gobind Khorana was an Indian American biochemist who was born on January 9th, 1922 and passed away on November 9th, 2011. He co-shared the 1968 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Marshall W. Nirenberg and Robert W. Holley when he was the faculty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, for work demonstrating the order of nucleotides in nucleic acids, which handle the genetic code of the cell and regulate the cell’s synthesis of proteins. The Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize was given to Khorana and Nirenberg by Columbia University during the same year. Khorana, born in British India, held faculty positions at three North American colleges. In 1966, he applied for naturalisation as a citizen of the US, and in 1987, he was awarded the National Medal of Science.

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Brief About Har Gobind Khorana

Khorana was born into a Punjabi Hindu family in Raipur, a village near Multan, Punjab, Pakistan, to Krishna Devi Khorana and Ganpat Rai Khorana. He felt that he was born on January 9, 1922, because the precise date of his birth is unknown. This date has since been widely recognised. He was the youngest of five kids. His father worked for the British Indian government as a patwari, or rural agricultural taxation clerk. The following is an excerpt from Khorana’s autobiography: “Although poor, my father was dedicated to educating his children and we were practically the only literate family in the village inhabited by about 100 people“. He went to Multan, West Punjab’s, D.A.V. (Dayanand Anglo-Vedic) High School. With the help of scholarships, he continued his education at the Punjab University in Lahore, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in the year 1943 and a master’s degree in the year 1945.

Khorana resided in British India up until 1945, when he relocated to England on a Government of India Fellowship to attend the University of Liverpool and pursue organic chemistry. Roger J. S. Beer served as his advisor as he earned his PhD in 1948. He continued postdoctoral research with Professor Vladimir Prelog at ETH Zurich in Switzerland the next year. He performed unpaid alkaloid chemistry research for about a year. He briefly struggled in 1949 to find employment in the Punjab region of his birth. He went back to England on a fellowship to study on peptides and nucleotides with George Wallace Kenner as well as Alexander R. Todd. From 1950 to 1952, he was a resident of Cambridge. After taking a job with the British Columbia Research Council at the University of British Columbia, he and his family relocated to Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1952. A later colleague recounted how Khorana was eager to launch his own lab. Later, according to his tutor, the Council provided the researcher with “all the freedom in the world” despite having little facilities at the time.

As stated by the American Chemical Society, his research in British Columbia focused on “nucleic acids and synthesis of numerous key biomolecules.” Khorana agreed to take a job as the co-director of the Institute for Enzyme Research at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the year 1960. In 1962, he was appointed Conrad A. Elvehjem Professor of Life Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He began working on creating functioning genes while at Wisconsin, as reported by the American Chemical Society, and “began to work on synthesizing functional genes“. He finished the research that earned him a share of the Nobel prize while he was a student at this university. The award was given “for their interpretation of the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis“, according to the Nobel web site. The following describes Har Gobind Khorana’s role: he “made important contributions to this field by building different RNA chains with the help of enzymes. Using these enzymes, he was able to produce proteins. The amino acid sequences of these proteins then solved the rest of the puzzle“.

In 1966, he obtained US citizenship. Khorana served as the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Biology and Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology starting in 1970. He then served as a member of The Scripps Research Institute’s Board of Scientific Governors. In 2007, he left MIT and retired. In 1952, Har Gobind Khorana wed Esther Elizabeth Sibler. They met in Switzerland and also had 3 kids, Julia Elizabeth, Emily Anne, and Dave Roy.

Har Gobind Khorana’s Research

Two alternate amino acids were created using ribonucleic acid (RNA) with two repeating units (UCUCUCU → UCU CUC UCU). This shown that UCU genetically codes for serine and CUC for leucine in conjunction with the Nirenberg and Leder experiment. Three distinct sequences of amino acids were created by RNAs with 3 repeating units (UACUACUA → UAC UAC UAC, or ACU ACU ACU, or CUA CUA CUA). UAG, UAA, and UGA are stop codons because RNAs with four repeating units that include any of them produced only dipeptides and tripeptides. They gave their Nobel lecture on December 12th, 1968. The first researcher to chemically create oligonucleotides was Khorana. The first synthetic gene was created as a result of this accomplishment in the 1970s; later on, the method expanded widely. As the CRISPR/Cas9 method for genome editing advanced, later researchers cited his work.

Subsequent Research

In 1972, he became the first person in the world to fully synthesise a working gene outside of a living creature after years of research. By extending the aforementioned to lengthy DNA polymers and assembling them into the first synthetic gene utilising polymerase and ligase enzymes that join sections of DNA together as well as techniques that before the development of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), he achieved this. These specially created artificial gene fragments are crucial to the rising use of DNA analysis to comprehend gene-based disease in humans as well as human evolution. They are frequently employed in biology labs for sequencing, cloning, and designing new plants and animals.

Anybody can now buy a synthetic oligonucleotide or a gene through any of the number of companies thanks to the automation and commercialization of Khorana’s invention(s). To obtain an oligonucleotide with the necessary sequence, one need only send the genome sequence to any of the appropriate companies. After the middle of the 1970s, his laboratory investigated the biology of bacteriorhodopsin, a membrane protein which uses a proton gradient to transform light energy into chemical energy. Later, his laboratory focused on researching the rhodopsin vision pigment, which has a similar structural makeup. A former coworker from the University of Wisconsin gave the following overview of his work: “Khorana was an early practitioner, and perhaps a founding father, of the field of chemical biology. He brought the power of chemical synthesis to bear on deciphering the genetic code, relying on different combinations of trinucleotides“.

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Awards and Honours

Along with sharing the Nobel Prize, Har Gobind Khorana was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1967, the American Philosophical Society in the year 1973, and the United States National Academy of Sciences in the year 1966. He was also made a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in the year 1978. The Khorana Program was jointly established in 2007 by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Government of India’s DBT (Department of Biotechnology), as well as the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum. The Khorana Program’s goal is to create a seamless network of researchers, businesspeople, and social entrepreneurs in India and the United States.

The program’s main goals are to give graduate and undergraduate students a life-changing research experience, involve partners in rural development and food security, and promote public-private collaborations between the United States and India. In 2007, the Wisconsin-India Science and Technology Exchange Program (WINStep Forward, WSF) took over management of the Khorana initiative. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Drs. Aseem Ansari and Ken Shapiro collaborated to establish WINStep Forward. In order to advance fundamental and applied research not just in biotechnology but also generally throughout all STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields, such as medicine, pharmacy, agriculture, wildlife, as well as climate change, WINStep Forward also authorises the nationally competitive S.N. Bose Initiatives for Indian and American students, respectively. Khorana was celebrated at the 33rd Steenbock Symposium in Madison, Wisconsin, in the year 2009 and was organised by the Khorana Program.

Following were the additional honours:

• American Academy of Achievement’s Golden Plate Award (1971)
• The Willard Gibbs Medal of the Chicago Section of the American Chemical Society (1974)
• The Gairdner Foundation Annual Award (1980)
• the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University (1969)
• the Lasker Foundation Award for Basic Medical Research (1969)
• Paul Kayser International Award of Merit in Retina Research (1987)

On January 9, 2018, the day before Har Gobind Khorana would have turned 96, a Google Doodle honoured his accomplishments.

Death of Har Gobind Khorana

At the age of 89, Khorana passed away in Concord, Massachusetts, on November 9th, 2011. Esther, his wife, as well as Emily Anne, his daughter, had passed away already, but Khorana was survived by his remaining two children. In a subsequent essay about her father’s career as a professor, Julia Elizabeth stated: “Even while doing all this research, he was always really interested in education, in students and young people“.

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